2015 Data+ Editors' Choice Awards

Freddie Gahr is aware of the benefits of TempuTech's analytics tool: It has prevented potentially costly equipment failures at Riceland Foods, where Gahr is a district manager. Byhalia, Miss.-based Tempu­Tech sells equipment monitoring systems designed to help farmers and grain management companies protect their investments.

At Riceland, Gahr says, the TempuTech system "alerts us before we have a problem, so we can get ahead of it." For example, he says, it tracks grain moving through his plant's equipment and will shut down operations if too much grain gets loaded. He adds that visual reports from monitoring equipment are clearly displayed on a 48-in. screen.

In recent years, TempuTech has endeavored to create more proactive components to increase the usefulness of its products. To do that, the company partnered with GE Intelligent Platforms to integrate systems and develop functions that enable real-time insights and actions.

"We take all those pieces [of data] into our solution, and we give customers good key performance indicators to say ‘Your stuff is working' or ‘If you do this, you can run more efficiently.' We can even predict that something might be ready to fail," says TempuTech vice president Adrian Merrill.

Additionally, TempuTech uses a GE cloud platform so it can deliver the analytics information to users in real time, to whatever device they prefer.